Hugh Eakin: Turkey’s Towering Ambition

 One longtime Istanbul resident, citing the government’s interest in malls and infrastructure projects that can “rival Mecca,” suggested that the new pro-Arab policies have been accompanied by Persian Gulf-style urban development. Large as it is, she observed, the planned Çamlıca mosque complex—which is apparently to be funded by pro-AKP businessmen—is far from Erdoğan’s most ambitious building project. In recent months, he has renewed his campaign promise to dig a second Bosphorus, a thirty-mile shipping channel to the Black Sea—an undertaking so enormous that, he claims, it would surpass the Suez and Panama canals. And the government’s announcement this spring that it plans to fill in a 2.8 square mile section of the Sea of Marmara along the Istanbul shore—apparently to create a public assembly space for up to 800,000 people—has been compared by one writer to “wanting to straighten the Seine or turn the Colosseum into a football stadium.”

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.